Martech Roundup Part 2, February 2021: Nielsen Launches ID Resolution System for Global Attribution Measurement and More

This is the monthly martech roundup of the top product launches, surveys, and funding in February 2021.

As we close February, the martech and adtech landscape saw significant activity, especially in the space of customer data privacy, personalization, and experience. For example, Dynamic Yield introduced a deep learning-based Ranking engine that allows ecommerce businesses to personalize their product listing pages (PLP). Similarly, Kibo released Social Proof, a new personalization technology feature that enhances personalized customer journeys. Nielsen, too, announced a new approach to privacy-centric, people-based identifiers for attribution, moving away from third-party cookies.

Check out these and other interesting product launches, research, and funding in our final roundup for February.

Table of Contents

Top Martech Product Updates in February 2021

• AppsFlyer announces predictive analytics solution for SKAdnetwork suite
• Dynamic Yield introduces deep learning-based personalized listing pages to improve ecommerce sales
• Pattern89 announces new features to enhance marketing performance and visibility
• Nielsen launches ID resolution system for global attribution measurement
• Google announces inclusion of YouTube and Display ads in attribution reports
• DoubleVerify announces availability of its data solution for global brands
• LinkedIn launches Sales Insights for sales leaders
• Taboola announces a way for publishers to personalize their digital properties
• Kibo announces Social Proof to enhance unified customer journey

Top Martech Surveys and Reports in February 2021

• Braze releases key findings from 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review
• Most businesses have fragmented, dated, and distorted picture of their customers says Sugar report
• Rollworks and Bombora release new research report on B2B perspective on using intent data

Top Funding in February 2021

• Terminus bags $90 million in Series C funding
• Hubilo secures $23.5 million Series A funding to redefine the future of event
• Blueshift raises $30 million in Series C funding to scale SmartHub CDP
• Highspot raises $200 million in Series E funding to take sales enablement mainstream

Top Martech Product Updates in February 2021

AppsFlyer announces predictive analytics solution for SKAdnetwork suite

AppsFlyer announcedOpens a new window the upcoming launch of PredictSK, a new predictive analytics product that will be part of SK360, the company’s SKAdNetwork suite. The product will be available after Apple starts enforcing the AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework. AppsFlyer had earlier added SK360 to its set of iOS solutions to equip advertisers with the ability to enhance their campaigns accurately and drive positive results.

PredictSK will be officially launched later this year, in line with Apple’s ATT enforcement. With the solution, advertisers can leverage early engagement signals within 24-72 hours to predict long-term campaign performance. The solution will put mobile attribution in SKAdNetwork on autopilot.

“Our guiding star has been and always will be the advertisers’ needs,” said Barak Witowski, vice president, Core Product, AppsFlyer. “As part of our holistic set of iOS solutions, AppsFlyer’s SK360 suite will empower brands to eliminate the uncertainty brought on by limited data availability and limited measurement capabilities, while maintaining end user privacy. This will be done by combining multiple solutions for maximum coverage. Moreover, PredictSK will enable measurement across all user events to quickly and accurately predict user LTV, helping advertisers save precious time and money.”

Dynamic Yield introduces deep learning-based personalized listing pages to improve ecommerce sales

Dynamic Yield introducedOpens a new window its deep learning-based Ranking engine that allows ecommerce businesses to personalize their product listing pages (PLP). The Ranking engine is designed to automatically generate the optimal sorting order of items across listing pages. It uses a sophisticated self-training deep learning model, which predicts a consumer will most likely engage with or buy based on in-session activity, past behaviors, and trends seen across the site at any given moment. Gradually being rolled out to its customers, the solution is part of Dynamic Yield’s adaptive AI system.

“As Covid-times have created an unprecedented surge in online shopping, serving consumers with the products they have been looking for faster has grown in importance,” said Liad Agmon, CEO, Dynamic Yield. “Using Dynamic Yield’s Ranking engine to personalize product listing pages, brands can tailor some of their most high-trafficked pages according to each visitor’s interest and in the moment needs. This helps directly increase product clicks, add-to-cart rates, and most importantly, average revenue per user (ARPU).”

Pattern89 announces new features to enhance marketing performance and visibility

Pattern89, a platform that uses creative artificial intelligence (AI) to predict digital marketing performance, announcedOpens a new window new features that will help brands enhance visibility into ad performance. These upgrades will streamline and improve user experience (UX) while allowing marketers to access real-time predictive performance insights and assemble and launch top-performing ad combinations. The new features will be launched throughout Q1 of 2021.

Some of the updates include:

• Predicting creative performance, with improved functionality and datasets of more than 300 billion data points.
• Extending creative lifecycle with custom performance dashboards and simplified alerts.
• Launching advanced analytics to enable marketers to understand the why behind the creative performance.
• New API to integrate Pattern89’s creative insights with existing marketing automation tools.

“Marketing is not about educated guesses anymore – it is about data and creativity. Brands and agencies want to use artificial intelligence to unlock the data behind every creative idea,” said R. J. Talyor, CEO and founder, Pattern89. “So we listened to our customers and upgraded both the Pattern89 application and our API to power every creative decision they make.”

Nielsen launches ID resolution system for global attribution measurement

Nielsen announced a new approach to privacy-centric, people-based identifiers for attribution. The new technique, Identity Sync, moves away from third-party cookies. It also ensures publishers and advertisers can understand the entire customer journey, optimize their spending, and prove advertising’s impact.

Identity Sync is the industry’s first non-campaign specific tag that does not depend on device IDs or the browser ecosystem. This allows an always-on, real-time collection of advertiser data associated with individuals, devices they use, and the online actions they take. Additionally, it enables Nielsen to develop deterministic matches between consumers and their ad exposures using persistent identifiers.

“At Nielsen, we are committed to helping our clients navigate the cookie-less world and unlock the next generation of metrics that enable them to drive outcomes, maximize reach, and optimize their budgets, “ said Matt Krepsik, GM, Planning & Outcomes Products, Nielsen. “With our transformed approach to Attribution, we are turning data into actionable insights so advertisers can understand the impact of their marketing efforts and publishers can continue to prove the impact of advertising on their platforms.”

Google announces the inclusion of YouTube and Display ads in attribution reports

Google announcedOpens a new window including YouTube ads to attribution reports in beta to enable businesses to understand video’s role in their customers’ path to purchase. The company also added Display ads in beta to further provide a holistic view of an organization’s Google media.

Eligible advertisers can opt-in within the Measurement>Attribution section of Google Ads. Once they opt in, they can see both Display Ads and YouTube in all attribution reports along with Search ads. The reports include Assisted Conversions, Top Paths, Model Comparison, and Path Metrics reports.

DoubleVerify announces the availability of its data solution for global brands

DoubleVerify announcedOpens a new window the broad availability of DV Authentic AttentionTM, the first privacy-friendly data solution, to provide timely, impression-level insights to optimize campaign performance. The data solution analyzes over 50 data points on the exposure of a digital ad and consumer’s engagement with it and the device in real-time. DV Authentic AttentionTM is part of DV Performance Solutions, which features DV Custom Contextual — a privacy-friendly targeting solution that does not rely on third-party cookies.

For exposure, the solution analyzes an ad’s entire presentation and quantifies its intensity and prominence through metrics. These metrics include share of screen, viewable time, audibility, video presentation, and more. For audience engagement, the solution evaluates key user-initiated events that occur while the ad creative is displayed. These events include user touches, video playback, screen orientation, and audio control interactions.

DV Authentic Attention^TM allows advertisers to benchmark top-performing sites and apps, evaluate cost-effective private marketplace deals characterized by high performance, and focus on the ad units and creatives that deliver the most impact.

LinkedIn launches Sales Insights for sales leaders

LinkedIn announcedOpens a new window the availability of LinkedIn Sales Insights (LSI) for sales operations and sales leaders. LSI will enable sales leaders to answer questions, such as who works in an organization, what they are trying to accomplish, and how many people could benefit from the product/solution. With LSI, sales leaders will have access to a powerful dataset — LinkedIn Economic Graph — a people-powered and real-time information source.

LSI was first introduced to the market last year. It is a data enrichment and analytics platform powered by more than 722 million members. This will allow sales leaders to be more strategic and keep member privacy preserved. The tool also enables sales ops to focus their teams on the right accounts through a foundation of real-time market, account, and relationship data and insights. LSI further uses artificial intelligence (AI) and data mining to improve the quality of insights.

Taboola announces a way for publishers to personalize their digital properties

Taboola introducedOpens a new window a new addition to its suite of segmentation and personalization offerings for publishers. Publishers partnering with Taboola can now access new loyalty features as part of the suite. This includes a proprietary loyalty score built on AI and deep learning. This will help them segment readers based on attributes such as how many pages they visit, how frequently they visit, and how recently they visited. Publishers can then use the platform to deliver the ideal experience to each reader segment.

Publishers can also segment readers into categories, including loyal readers, flyby readers, and casual readers. They can then personalize the reader experience based on these loyalty levels. This can include:

• Adjusting publishers’ own content vs. advertising content
• Surfacing abridged articles that feature a ‘Read More’ button, focusing only on flyby readers
• Recommending special offers to loyal readers to subscribe to content or sign up for newsletters

Kibo announces Social Proof to enhance unified customer journey

Kibo, a unified commerce solution provider, releasedOpens a new window Social Proof, a new personalization technology feature. This feature will enhance the personalized customer journey. Social Proof will enable retailers to deliver timely, customized easily, and hyper-relevant messaging to incentivize a desired action. It will also allow retailers to convert more browsers into customers by using social proof actions to notify shoppers if the product they view is trending. Retailers can customize actions, leverage in-session and historical data, and test and personalize within Kibo’s personalization platform.

Social Proof offers retailers:

• Fully customized and responsive experiences
• Ease of segmentation and testing
• Testing, recommending, personalizing, and delivering social proof messaging — within a single user interface

“Social Proof allows our retailer clients to deliver personalized experiences that drive impressive results. Initial use cases show an average increase in Add-to-Cart rates of over 100%,” said Ram Venkataraman, chief product and technology officer, Kibo. “This addition to Kibo Personalization delivers even more richness to the unified customer journey across both digital and in-store marketing and commerce channels, allowing brands to ramp up customer engagement anywhere and anytime.”

Top Martech Surveys and Reports in February 2021

Braze releases key findings from 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review

Braze released its inaugural 2021 Global Customer Engagement ReviewOpens a new window . The report examines macro trends, identifies opportunities for brands to improve strategies, and defines what successful customer engagement looks like. The review findings break down tactics that drive business goals-to-revenue-across industries. Additionally, each industry breakdown features a case study from a leading brand, demonstrating the tangible success resulting from industry-leading customer engagement strategies.

Braze also developed the Customer Engagement Index as part of the review. The framework assesses brands against 12 competencies across two key axes — teams and technology. The following are the key findings of the study.

• More brands will see customer engagement as critical to business growth
• Even brands confident in their strategies find showing success challenging
• Marketing budgets will grow and have a heavy focus on customer engagement tools
• Marketers cannot live on one channel alone

Most businesses have fragmented, dated, and distorted picture of their customers, says SugarCRM report

SugarCRM recently released a new CRM and Sales Impact ReporOpens a new window t, surveying 1,000 sales professionals in the U.S., U.K, Germany, and Australia using a range of traditional CRM systems. The research states that most businesses have a fragmented, dated, and distorted image of their customers, which affects the level of service they deliver. To transform the customer experience (CX) into a competitive advantage, businesses must replace their current view of customers with one rich in breadth and depth. Failure to achieve this high-definition CX can severely impact the ability of sales professionals to grow.

According to the research, 48% of sales professionals believe that the CRMs they use are unfit for purpose and customer churn costs mid-market companies an average of $5.5 million a year each. The report findings confirmed Sugar’s premise that traditional CRMs suffer from a lack of fidelity and need more effort to maintain than the value they provide.

Rollworks and Bombora release new research report on B2B perspective on using intent data

Bombora and Rollworks, in partnership with Ascend2, recently surveyed a panel of marketing influencers and marketing research subscribers and released The B2B perspective on Using Intent DataOpens a new window report. The survey covers questions like:

• What marketers really think about intent data
• Where priorities lie for using intent data
• The biggest challenges they face when using intent data

The following are the key findings from the survey:

• About 73% of respondents said they are already using, rolling out, or planning to use intent data in the next 12 months.
• About 56% of respondents said that the primary goal for using intent data was to identify new target accounts, while 51% said that aligning sales and marketing was their primary goal. 38% said that they use intent data to prioritize accounts for prospecting.
• Nearly all (96%) B2B marketing professionals surveyed said they experienced at least some level of success achieving the goals associated with the use of intent data.
• About 56% said data quality was the biggest challenge faced when using intent data. About 50% said making intent data actionable was the biggest challenge, while 36% said data security was the biggest challenge.

Top Funding in February 2021

Terminus bags $90 million in Series C funding

Terminus, the account-based marketing (ABM) platform, raisedOpens a new window $90 million in Series C funding, led by Great Hill Partners with participation from existing investors Edison Partners, Atlanta Ventures, and Hallett Capital. The funding will be used to accelerate data product innovation, market expansion, and hiring. The investment by Great Hill Partners brings the total funding to $125 million.

Along with the funding, Chris Gaffney and Derek Schoettle from Great Hill Partners will join Terminus’ Board of Directors.

“Continued innovation for our customers is our #1 priority. This infusion of capital accelerates our ability to bring the best data, channels, and analytics all together in one hub to power high-performing go-to-market teams,” said Tim Kopp, Terminus chief executive officer. “We helped launch the account-based movement seven years ago, but ABM has evolved into so much more than marketing. It is how companies bring GTM teams – marketing, sales, and customer success – together to drive long-term revenue growth.

Hubilo secures $23.5 million Series A funding to redefine the future of event

Hubilo, a virtual and hybrid events platform, raisedOpens a new window $23.5 million in Series A funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Balderton Capital. The company had previously raised $4.5 million in the seed round in November 2020. The funding indicates an exponential growth in Hubilo’s business and investor belief in the category.

Hubilo plans to use the funding to expand its leadership teams globally and establish offices in San Francisco and London. The company also plans to establish its sales, marketing, and customer success teams out of these offices. Further, the funding will help the company accelerate the development of Hubilo’s platform. The company plans to add several more features to its platform to enable better attendee engagement and new monetization opportunities for event organizers.

Blueshift raises $30 million in Series C funding to scale SmartHub CDP

Blueshift, the AI-powered customer data platform, announcedOpens a new window raising a $30 million Series C funding, led by Avatar Growth Capital and Fort Ross Ventures. Other participants included Softbank Ventures Asia, Conductive Ventures, Storm Ventures, and Nexus Venture Partners. The total amount of funding now stands at $65 million.

Blueshift was named one of the fastest-growing companies on Deloitte’s Fast 500 Technology recently. The company will use the funding to accelerate its global growth further and solidify its position in the CDP market.

“With the increased urgency towards digital transformation, we have seen an increased demand for a SmartHub CDP, that can not only unify silo-ed data, but also unify silo-ed experiences,” said Vijay Chittoor, co-founder and CEO, Blueshift. “I am very pleased to welcome both Fort Ross Ventures and Avatar Growth Capital to the Blueshift family as they have tremendous experience with enterprise-focused scale-ups at our stage of rapidly accelerating growth.”

Highspot raises $200 million in Series E funding to take sales enablement mainstream

Highspot, a unified native sales-enablement platform, raisedOpens a new window $200 million in Series E funding. The funding round was led by Tiger Global Management with participation from Bain & Company, ICONIQ Growth, OpenView, Salesforce Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Shasta Ventures, and Sapphire Ventures. The total value of Highspot now stands at $2.3 billion.

Highspot will use the funding proceedings for its next wave of growth, including product innovation, international expansion, partner ecosystem, and community commitment.

“Sales enablement is about more than sales. It connects everyone from marketing and sales to post-sales in delivering a unified buying experience that wins, retains and expands customer relationships,” said Robert Wahbe, CEO, Highspot. “Scaling your go-to-market strategy is a complex process with a large gap between strategy and action. We close this gap. Our single, unified platform improves sales performance by turning strategy into successful execution.”

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